Capture and Rescue
by Serendipity1
Summary: She didn’t come this far just to greet the corpse of a friend." Third installment of ‘Hands’ and ‘Retrieval’.
1. hands

**Capture and Rescue**

By: Serendipity1

* * *

The room is dark, not because of the particular time of day or location of the building, but because it is completely devoid of any windows. It even seems to lack a door, as there are no tiny slivers of almost-light, and no slight flow of air and sound. It is only blackness and himself alone, with each joint, each tendon affixed to a strand of chakra.

He thinks the whole affair is like a web, or the collection of strings a puppet is attached to. He is unable to move his body. The last time he tried to perform this action, there had been a rather unpleasant jolt very much like being struck by red-hot coals, and bright colors bloomed briefly before his eyes, and he knows that even then he had not moved more than a fraction of an inch. Movement is clearly no option at all.

The air smells of nothing much. There are no discernable sounds. There are, in fact, no sounds at all.

They have been very particular in what they allow their captive to detect.

There are no other observations to make.

Sai is therefore silent, waiting for more data. He does not have enough resources, information, or ability to attempt a successful escape now. Therefore, his options are A) he must wait for his teammates to seek him out and find him, and B) he will use any opening that may or may not come his way. It does not look like he has any feasible options now.

They, and he uses 'they' because these ninja are unmarked, silent, and unidentified as belonging to any land at all, these people have tortured him before now. He thinks probably they will do so again, and they do not surprise him by proving this assumption correct.

They do so in uneven periods, slowly disturbing his sense of time. It is a common tactic Sai remembers learning in his training, meant for mental torture: he is now unable to track the passage of time. He has decided that this has as of yet failed to drive him insane. The physical torture is not excruciating, but it is repetitive: the find the weak points of his body and torment them with senbon, sharpened and electrified with lightning chakra.

They draw this out over a period of what Sai has judged to be days: days in which he occupies his mind in rehearsing facts, recalling his teammates faces, invoking images such as the light, feathered veins of leaves and the blackness of ink.

Figures pass by him and attach themselves to the web he is trapped in, and soon he feels their fingertips like razors in his skin. It is now when they ask their questions. He closes his eyes and his mouth against them, and his mind is like a paintbrush over the mindscape of his memories. Like building up layers in watercolor, he thinks of colors: flashy orange, pink in the flossy silk of hair, green with fringed black lashes and swept-blue sky.

Words pass from his lips eventually, but they are not the answers his torturers are looking for. He describes ramen to them with an amiable and friendly smile. Sai has a book about ramen at home that he has memorized for such a occasion. As a ninja he is prepared for everything, even capture and torture. They fail to appreciate his efforts, and he spends the next unfathomable amount of time in the web, his body stretched out tightly, muscles straining hard enough to break, and each nerve afire with the agony.

They tire of him eventually. He has not supplied them with information, and he is not a valuable hostage. Sai has been a member of Root, used to being a commodity: disposable, interchangeable. He is not altogether upset about this opinion. Dying does not affect him. He tells them so.

"We do not intend to kill you, Sai of Konoha," the answer is the first spoken thing he has yet heard that is not a question. The speaker is old, female, and very smug about some unknown thing. "We intend to break you. Such is the way of our people."

They crush his fingers.

Before doing so, they gave him the choice of mutilation: he will have the bones in his hands crushed, or the tendons slit, or the hands themselves cut away. The answer was no answer at all, one more response he refused to give. They chose crushing because it was more painful, because it took the longest, because it stretched out every flicker of hope and crushed it as well and as slowly as the bones.

He doesn't scream. Sai is quite likely incapable of such a thing. To be truthful, he can't remember his reaction aside from the pain and the dizzying sensation of being elsewhere and separate from this thing. The old woman's fingers, enhanced by chakra, take great care and pleasure in selecting each bone in each hand individually. Twenty-seven bones in each hand, fifty-four bones to break. She touches each nerve as she does so, and he can not escape the cracking, the grinding sounds. She rips his fingernails from his ruined fingers as a final touch.

When it is done, he can barely breathe.

Sai is silent and polite even as the web lets him go and he realizes he is not in a dark room in all, but actually blinded. He says nothing as they jeer at him, at his negligent teammates, at his pathetic Konoha. They bundle up the remains of his hands in thick silk bindings and heal them into fists. He throws up when it is done, an uncontrolled reaction.

He doesn't know why.

"You are free to go," he is told when the healers are done with him. "Wherever it is you can travel. We have no use of you now."

His hands ache down to the bone, down so deep and far it affects his chest, his breathing.

He will not hold a brush again, he thinks.

Sai goes home.


	2. retrieval

**Capture and Rescue**

_part two: retrieval_

By: Serendipity1

____

The first thing Sakura feels when she hears the news of Sai's capture is a horrible rush of déjà vu and the thought of 'No, not _again_'.

Not that Sai's never been captured before, of course, but there was that one sudden disappearance way back when they first started working with him, (_which doesn't actually count_,) and there was that other kidnapping that has left a gaping void in Team Seven. (_Unsuccessful attempts to fill it with Sai aside.) _It seems, sometimes, when Sakura is in the mood to be philosophical about the mangled-up comedy of errors that has become her ninja career, that the entire world is out to kidnap and kill her teammates, and she is always just on the borderline of being able to help, watching from the sidelines.

So naturally the second thing she feels is the overwhelming desire to drop everything and go and _do_ something about it. The everything she drops turns out to be half a stack of highly interesting medical texts that map out the chakra lines in the body. They flutter to the floor, looking like dozens of small and dissected bodies around her. Yamato, who is not typically expressive in any case, looks regretful. Either for telling her this or for what has happened to this team yet again.

"Captured?" and her voice is surprisingly firm and stable, "When?"

They didn't know, exactly. All they knew was that he'd been on a mission with ANBU, something of jonin-level danger that she was not cleared to know, and that Sai had discreetly gone missing somewhere along the way. That he has been spirited away without any sign of a struggle, with hardly a trail to follow.

The general assumption, she is told, is that whoever was responsible for it had merely wanted a Konoha shinobi, whichever one they could get their hands on. It made it worse, somehow, seeing that this was nothing personal. That Sai was just faceless, replaceable to them.

"I'll get Naruto," she says, fists clenched and trembling, sharpness like steel in her tone. Yamato tries to tell her something before she goes, but by that time she has already gone too far to hear anything but smudged syllables. She'll listen to him after she's done making her preparations.

____

Halfway to Ichiraku, she hears the first whisper of a rumor. It's quiet enough and vague enough for her to allow it to flow right past her ears without touching her cognitively, but one word manages to stick. Red-hot, like a brand, the word 'traitor.' The murmurs hush as she passes, only to speed up again as she rushes by. Traitor, she hears in the whispered words, deserter.

By the time she reaches the ramen stand, she's got a sense of trepidation and she thinks she knows well enough what's waiting for her. It doesn't make it any easier.

Naruto is standing in a fighting stance- hands not fisted, but almost coiled into claws. His back looks rigid, muscles bunched, head jutted out in challenge to the two taller, black-clad ninja he's talking to. The light spills out and illuminates the scene a little too perfectly, and to her keen senses, Naruto's chakra almost seems to crackle like fire, like static electricity. She's fairly sure that if she was looking at his face, his eyes would be the vulpine slits of rage that meant he was drawing on kyuubi's power. Not a good sign for the two members of ANBU he's talking to, not a good sign for Naruto's wellbeing in the near future.

Sakura steps towards them and almost freezes as one of them, the taller, pale-haired one opens his mouth. "I meant what I said," he says- almost drawls it out, derisively, "It was pretty clear from the footprints, kid. He walked out on his own free will. He deserted."

"I don't know why you're so surprised," the other adds, "It's not like this is the first traitor that Team Seven-"

Those are the last words out of his mouth, because in the next half-second, Sakura is there and her fist lands a punch to his jaw, then to his chest, two hits in quick succession. She hears and feels a rib crack beneath her knuckles: had that punch been enhanced with chakra, she would have broken them all. Sakura _wants_ to, of course. She just knows better.

Naruto steps forward until he's standing directly beside her, his chakra swirling hungrily around him, his eyes very nearly luminescent, lit with a faint underglow of red. Sakura gathers her own chakra in her fingertips and knuckles, reinforces it all the way up her arms.

"If you say one more word about Sai, I will personally break your bones," she says, and means on the weight of everything that has made her up to this point. Naruto backs her up with a 'hell yeah', of course, and the two of them just stand side-by-side in an unrelenting defense. It's a perfect moment, or it would be if it hadn't been missing an extra side.

Still, these are jonin and they are ANBU and it would have gone very hard for them if Yamato and Kakashi hadn't shown up in a cloud of smoke and performed some very speedy restraining techniques.

As they pick up the pieces and pay the tab and leave, she feels the eyes of the onlookers on them, cold and speculative.

"We'll get him back and show them," Naruto growls, and Sakura is far too reminded of the other one they haven't yet saved.

_____

"Sakura," Yamato says warningly, as they head down the street to retrieve the information on the last mission their missing teammate (_one of them_) had taken. Naruto has been left behind to prepare their things, pack up, and (_this is left unspoken_), to cool down. Both of them have flaring tempers, but Naruto's lingers over time, close to the surface. It needs only to be scratched barely before it overflows. Sakura sympathizes, since Sasuke and missing friends are a sore point for both of them- it's like a knife hidden close to their hearts, scratching them at any unexpected move. They're both too vulnerable to that attack.

"He's not a traitor," is all she says, pulling her gloves firmly on her hands. It's all she will allow herself to say.

Contrary to popular belief, Sai is not like Sasuke. He isn't driven outside of his place as a Konoha shinobi, he isn't tortured by some internal and desperate desire. Sai proceeds logically within the boundaries of his training, and where Sasuke was intense, he is merely pragmatic.

And he is no traitor. If nothing else, Root has seen to that. He doesn't have it in him to turn his back on Konoha.

"I wasn't going to say he was," Yamato says, eventually. He tries to put a hand on her shoulder, but she ignores it as they stride towards the office of the Hokage.

Sakura can remember the smirks of the ANBU who'd been with him, the contemptuous tilt of their heads, the arrogance in their tone that exempt them from all responsibility. The bastards who'd failed in their duty to protect a member of their team- to protect Sai. They had his life in each others' hands and they'd let him _walk into danger_. Sakura grits her teeth and clenches her fists and tries her best not to lay all the blame on them. Her best isn't quite good enough.

"I won't tolerate people who badmouth my teammates," is what she says.

The ground beneath her cracks just a bit under her footsteps.

_____

They end up traveling for days.

Sai's ANBU team reported his disappearance just at the edge of Grass country, and they travel through the place for weeks on end, searching for any signs of his whereabouts.

Sometimes they do hear things- they hear stories of a group of shinobi in long, dust-colored robes and grim faces. No weapons visible, but they are called the chakra weavers for a reason, and Yamato's estimation is that they manipulate the chakra in the body to make human puppets. They hear snatches of their plans: of a nomadic people who search for a homeland, of a culture of shinobi that function like a moving nation of bandits, of a mercenary group who weave chakra like cloth and use it to ensnare their targets.

None of this helps them find their teammate, though. Naruto flings himself into the hunt, jumping at every perceived clue…and spending each night a tightly-wound mass of strained muscle and tension. They've been in the country for five weeks before their hope starts flagging and each night of failure is like a leaden albatross on their hearts. Sakura does not give up, and neither does Naruto, but they do hurt and they do grow heavier with each day. At the end of the fifth week, Naruto is half-ready to attack anyone who fits their description and she is more than ready to follow, despite her self control.

But then the bird woman arrives.

_____

The woman is quite old, but aged in a way that makes it unable to tell just how many years she has seen. She has skin the pale, dry color of old paper and a light, wiry build, and pale hair that curls like dry cornsilk. Her eyes, though, are unmistakably bird's eyes- wide and round and liquid black, with no whites to them unless she strains them open or pulls back her eyelids. All in all, it's pretty unsettling.

She has a young voice, though, and her words come out with a sound between a squawk and a chirp. She asks for nothing but food and fire, her tiny, fine-boned hands looking childish and too weak. Naruto, trusting, sympathetic Naruto offers her an _onigiri, _and Sakura eases her into place beside the fire for warmth. It feels suspiciously like a storybook read to her as a child.

"Life is warmer when you are young, child," the bird woman tells her, and there's a viselike strength in the grip she has on her wrist. She can sense it just beneath the arthritic fingers and delicate wrist bones on the woman, something inside her is gently coiled and holding back. The bird woman follows her eyesight and smiles, quiet and sweet.

Naruto is oblivious. "_Obaasan_, do you feel better?" he asks, and despite the recent weeks of frustration and downright dejection, there is compassion in his voice. The old woman smiles again, very slightly.

"Very much so," she says. "Oh, children. Such good children."

There is something hungry in her words and the dark wetness of her eyes as she looks at them, but she seems to shake it off in a movement of her shoulders not unlike a bird's. Sakura can't help the comparison, despite herself. The woman seems too much like a tame thing gone mad to be sure about, and she begins wondering about the trustworthiness of strangers. Especially ones that made her feel like prey when they watch her movements.

Behind them, Yamato steps into the firelight. "You're the Deliverer, am I right?" he asks, making the word sound more like a title than a description.

"Once," the woman says, "But the art has been lost to most of us now."

He hands her a piece of paper that has been crumpled and folded twice before. "I have one last delivery request to make."

____

A Deliverer, apparently, is nothing more than someone who can deliver messages.

To anyone, anywhere.

Whether the shinobi who Delivers the message can see them or not, or knows of them, or even knows their name.

It's an old, old kind of ninjitsu, something that is rarely seen now. The clan who perfected this technique died out…or were killed.

"So what?" Naruto grumbles to himself, annoyed with the delay and with, apparently the note of import this information is given with. "Just a stupid messenger. Yamato-_taichou_ can send a letter to the old- to the Hokage by himself, right?"

Behind them, the old woman is taking out a slip of rice paper printed with kanji, and Sakura has the faint buzzing of understanding as she watches.

"It's to find him, isn't it?" she asks, quietly. She really sounds much more hushed than she'd needed to be, and she thinks part of that is because she doesn't _want_ to be wrong in this. "She can find anyone. So she can find Sai?"

"That's the idea," Yamato says, and Naruto's eyes go wide and jubilant. "Very observant, Sakura."

"I'll need something of him," the woman says. She holds out a claw of a hand.

"Handwriting, of course, and blood. Fresh blood is best, but that is not possible, yes? Old blood is not as good, but with the handwriting it should be well enough."

Yamato looked at a loss. "I'd heard handwriting was all that was required?"

"Blood," the woman replied. "Blood, or hair, or flesh. Else, how am I supposed to find his body? Writing only does so much." The paper is folded now into the shape of a small crane, crisp and waiting.

Sakura sighs. "I have some." It's a vial of his blood she keeps along with two or three others, in the case she ever runs into a hemotoxin. Naruto gives her one of those looks that means she's done something he finds somewhat disturbing, but she ignores it as she hands it over.

The woman opens the vial gently, delicately, as if it holds expensive perfume oil, and then drips it into her mouth and onto her tongue. She lets out a low, sensuous sigh of pleasure and her eyes slit half-shut, and Sakura looks away. Naruto makes some kind of disgusted sound behind her.

Deliverers, she learns later, were once paid in the blood of children.

The woman breathes lightly on the crane and a thin, grayish-colored chakra oozes from her mouth, settling itself around the origami bird. Its wings flutter once, then twice, and then it lifts itself into the air. The bird woman looks at them and smiles. "My crane is a fast one, now," she says. "Be sure to hurry."

Then she utters a name that is unfamiliar to Sakura and the bird flutters into the air and flies.

___

The crane is quick- hummingbird quick and nimble, darting through trees and eventually, around buildings. They follow it at a tireless pace, occasionally riding summoned creatures on their trail of the bird, which is actually quite difficult to see once it is airborne.

By the time the bird dips to ground-level, flitting serenely a foot above their heads, they are at the very edge of Grass country.

This is where they will find Sai.


	3. healing

**Capture and Rescue**

_part three: healing_

By: Serendipity1

___

The bird-woman's paper crane hovers in indecision for a brief moment before settling gracefully at the feet of a figure by the side of the road. The person, slouched, dark head on his knees, doesn't move even when the bird gently unfolds itself and dissolves as if it's touched by flame. Thick, gray chakra boiled up from the spot like smoke, stroking a circle in the air around the person who may be Sai. He looks up for an instant, his profile clear and heart-wrenchingly recognizable, his eyes fever-wide- and then he slumps to the side and collapses.

Sakura's heart leaps to her throat and she starts running down the road, shoving past people on the street, nearly tripping over a vendor and his soba cart. Naruto is fast on her heels, she can tell by the sound of his feet pounding against the dirt, his breath coming fast just behind her. All she can think of is '_is he safe?_' '_is he alive?_' '_he'd better be alive._' She didn't come this far just to greet the corpse of a friend.

Sai doesn't even look up at them as they rush to his side, and when they get up close enough they can see why. No blood, she thinks, her detached medic-nin inner voice labeling and prioritizing injuries. No healing bruises on his face, nothing in the way he holds himself to suggest internal injury. He is wrapped up in some kind of rough blanket, but they've taken the ANBU uniform and left him in rags beneath it. Sakura unfolds the blanket from him, a little unnerved by his passivity. Beneath the dirt, his skin is sickly pale, his breathing is shallow, and his hands-

Oh god.

Oh _god._

His _hands_.

And behind her as white noise, vaguely buzzing in her ears, she hears the people passing by, she hears the thousand sounds of life in any town, she hears her teammates. Naruto yelling something at Yamato, yelling at him to hurry up, get his butt over here, Sai's hurt, he's not moving, he's hurt.

He's _hurt_.

All of these noises seem to blend into one buzz of white noise, and she can't hear. Sakura isn't focusing much on anything but the possible patient in front of her. No more fractures that she can see. The vestiges of healed rope burns on his wrists, a recent bruise mottling in a swash just beneath his chin, spreading across the line of his jaw. And his hands…she forces herself to see them: gnarled and twisted into fists. They look like they've been turned into clay and molded into shape, and she feels the twist of nausea in her stomach as the thought of how they must have done it occurs.

They shattered the bones in his hands.

Not broke. _Shattered. _And reformed them into fists, crushed and reformed them and finally made them freeze in place.

_That's not what healing is for. That is _not _what healing is for._

_Those bastards will pay._

Sai isn't even looking at her, but it's not because he's unconscious or too sick to realize she's there. He's weak enough with fever that he can't move without dizziness, but she knows that he's aware. His pupils aren't dilated, from what she can see, and his gaze is steady, even if it's not fixed at her. Sai knows they're there, and the fact that he refuses to acknowledge their presence- can't, won't, or doesn't think he deserves to?

Beneath her hands, she feels the rise and fall of his breath, and the ragged way it pulls from his lungs. Congestion. He may be sick as well as- as wounded. A quick search tells her that he has a bad chest cold that hasn't yet turned to pneumonia, but nothing she can't fix with medicine. Even if she can't purchase it here, the herbs she needs to make the medicine won't be too difficult to find in time. Thank goodness for small miracles. Next to everything else, this particular miracle seems microscopic.

Sakura tells herself it's better than better than having him dead, or out of reach. Crippled is better than dead. It means there's still hope.

"We need to move him someplace safe," she says as she senses Yamato and Naruto approach. "He needs to be cleaned- and preferably somewhere with a bed or mat we can lay him on."

Sai turns his face toward her, inspecting their expressions as if he's cataloguing every movement of each facial muscle, every quirk of the mouth and eyebrows. "So," he says finally, and his voice sounds like it's being torn out him, his throat almost too dry to speak, "You found me." And then his eyes close, and he is silent while they have to carry him away.

___

His eyes stay closed, even when he is safely laid down on a clean bed in one of the town's small hotels.

Sai doesn't speak when she kneels beside him, but she's sure he registers her presence. Sakura can read it in the sudden tenseness in his muscles, the lines defining themselves in the muscles of his neck, shoulders, bare chest. His stomach is hollow and taut, the muscles beneath it so well defined she can clearly read the flinch as he notices her come in.

Maybe the fever is keeping him delirious enough that he doesn't recognize friend from captor, she thinks. Stripped of his cloak, she sees more bruises on his upper body: a recent one on his ribcage, purpling to black, and green-brown marks around his arms. It's a story of abuse that she feels sick reading as she uses her chakra to wind around the body, inspecting it in detail. At the touch of her chakra he stiffens and jerks away, an automatic rejection.

"Sai," she tells him quietly. "It's just me."

He doesn't relax, necessarily, but he does remain still, his shoulders held in a way that suggest he expects pain. She sends a flow of chakra _through_ him this time, a preliminary rush of healing for everything minor: cuts, abrasions, and the bruises. His jaw tightens, the only sign he is reacting to anything that she's doing to him.

"Am I hurting you?" she asks, hoping for some kind of response. She doesn't get one. As she inspects and heals, he says nothing. Sai's eyes slit open only once through the whole procedure, look at her in a distant sort of way, and close once more after bare moments. It is in the highest point of his fever, and after this he falls into something she suspects to be sleep. Could be. Someone as thoroughly trained (_desensitized, brutalized, brainwashed_) as Sai is far beyond sleep. Like the older genin, he simply puts his body into standby, eyes shut, breath even, and mind at the ready.

___

Very, very few medic nin would have the skill and control to save his hands. Sakura just happens to number in that few. Not that she knows it. As far as she knows, nobody in their right mind would have tried to put together bones that mutilated and so far healed, because the chances of ruining them would make amputation a greater possibility than healing. Still, here she is with a jug of water, the usual equipment line-up for a chakra healing, and a few other things should the operation fail. She doesn't look at the gleaming edge on the metal blade or the clean towels, because that isn't even an _option_ for her.

"This is probably going to be painful," she starts to say, her chakra shimmering about her fingers. Sai turns to give her an impassive look- completely conscious now, and still silent. "No," she amends, "It _is _going to be painful.'

The sound he makes is an exhalation of breath, made hoarse with exhaustion, and tinged with the faintest trace of what could be a mirthless sort of laughter. "Don't worry. I will be capable of handling it."

"You already have," Sakura says, and takes one of his ruined hands in hers. He resists at first, instinctively, drawing back his arm and tightening his muscles. Then, remembering she is his medic, he relents. The bone under that skin is lumpy, malformed. Almost repulsive to touch. "I'll have to break them again. In order to re-form them, all the individual pieces must be…" she swallows down the lump in her throat, "Separate."

Sai gives her a quick glance, too fleeting for her to glean emotion from, and stares expressionlessly at the ceiling. "Understandable."

"The chances of this operation being successful are very slim," she tells him, professionally. Calmly. Keeping all trace of her fear and worries tightly under wraps, because it's not something he should see, nothing that could help him. "If I fail, your hands may be in constant pain, or we may need to amputate them. It's your choice whether or not you want me to make this attempt." Even Tsunade would have had second thoughts about undertaking an operation this delicate, this complicated. Sakura had no second thoughts, despite her doubts, but she wouldn't force the healing on him.

"I have lost the use of them already," Sai says, eyes still fixed on the ceiling, expression a mask of smooth, polite _nothing. _"I will suffer no further loss if my hands prove inoperable. If the operation does succeed, however, I will gain the use of my hands. The choice is simple."

She gives him the medicine to make him sleep. He's too weak to sit up or move, so he can't refuse by moving away. As Sakura swabs his arm with alcohol in preparation for the needle, his flesh twitches, his arm shifts from the touch. "I don't require the sedative," he says, quietly and firmly. "I have been fully trained to handle the pain. I assure you, the drug is unnecessary."

"I don't remember asking your opinion," Sakura replies. "I need you under in order for the procedure to be as safe as possible. If you're conscious, there's the chance you may move or react as I'm performing the surgery, which could ruin the procedure entirely. Do you have any negative reactions to this drug?"

Still no expression. "No."

"Well, then," she says, at a loss for what else to tell him. There's probably a whole paragraph of speech encased in that 'no', and most of it would be likely to compromise her professionalism as a medic in order to make the patient more emotionally comfortable. (_Which is a strange thought, seeing the patient doesn't typically make references to his emotions unless to confess to his confusion on how they work. _) So, she doesn't ask for details, just takes out the hypodermic needle and makes the injection. Physically fix him first, then piece together anything else.

She can tell he fights the drug from the way his eyelids twitch as he is pulled into the effects of the sedative. Before he goes under, he mutters something under his breath- a sentence or so, muffled by sleep. When she strains to hear it, she catches the tail end of what sounds like a dissertation on food.

"Ramen?" she frowns, forehead crinkling in puzzlement. It's not something she expects from this particular teammate, and especially not before an operation this critical. Still, people respond to the drug differently. Sakura shakes her head and then goes to work. There was something about how he said it, though. Some studied aspect, like he had memorized words from a text and recited them aloud. Like a chant, almost.

She puts it out of her mind as the chakra seeps in through his skin and she begins separating the bone fragments.

____

It's an understatement of phenomenal proportions to call this healing complex. It's almost as refined and delicate a procedure as rebuilding the entire skeletal structure would be. It's gruesome to look at: the hands flayed open, the bones shifting as she returns them to basic components and arranges them, careful not to disturb the muscles. The tendons she has to rebuild, the veins and capillaries re-lace into their fragile network. Complex is only the beginning, what she is attempting is staggeringly, impossibly difficult.

She has only fragments to work with, only the memory of shape of the hands she's worked with to guide her. Some pieces are fine as sand, others sharp and splintered. In the end, she has gathered all the pieces together in the order she believes is the closest to the original, the most perfect she can achieve, and fuses bone to bone.

It's painful. She knows it is just watching the body react, the spine drawing upward and flesh shivering. Sai is still asleep and drugged, which is all for the better. He's been in enough pain as it is. His muscles show signs of stress from just this kind of spasm, continued over a long period of time. Ruptures, previously-dislocated shoulders.

Torture. They took him, broke him, shattered his bones. _Torturers._

She watches him shudder in his sleep and in her mind, promises the same kind of pain to the people who have done this.


End file.
